Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Through the desert

My mother once told me a story and for some reason it's been on my mind recently.

Back in the day they had these tent revival meetings where a traveling evangelist would come to town and preach to everyone. One of these preachers used to draw a crowd by promising that at the end of the sermon he would lift the heaviest person in the audience using only his teeth. I guess he had some kind of harness device which he used.

They had no TV in those days so he used to draw huge crowds and everything was grand. Then one day he tried to lift a 300 lb farmer and all his teeth were ripped from his mouth and sent spraying out into the first two rows of the audience.

My mother's stories all have a moral at the end. This story could easily be a metaphor but normally my mother's morals were more straight forward and literal. Certainly, I never saw my mum lift anyone with her teeth.

Anyway, I'm in a small town called Isyolo. It's in northern Kenya. From Ethiopia to here is a really bad dirt road and desert. It also has a reputation as pretty dangerous so it's a relief to be past that.

From here it's tarmac. The next milestone is Nanyuki just 80km away. The thing is that Nanyuki is at the base of mount Kenya and the elevation is 4000 m so it's climbing all the way.

There was a mouse in Awasa that destroyed my micro USB converter and makes posting blogs trickier. It sort of sucks to blog about stuff that happened a while back. I'm going to do it anyway probably. If anyone complains I will ban their IP address. No actually, I'm just playing. It's really encouraging to read everyone's comments and emails. Thanks people.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wait, why were children throwing rocks at you? Just because they could? Bad kids! You need to ride with a switch!

-phina

Kenton Williston said...

Wow, what a disturbing story. (The one about the teeth.) I'm dying to know what the moral is! Tell us, tell, us!

just guessing said...

Well, Dan, it is good to know that you are still there. I can think of several possible morals for your mother's story. Perhaps she will comment, and help us all out.

Stay well, Aunt A.

Anonymous said...

Glad you are OK Dan. People at church have been asking about you when you didn't update for a while. We still pray for you and send you good vibes.